Henry Northcote

Northcote sat in his chambers in Shepherd’s Inn. Down below was Fleet Street, in the thrall of a bitter December twilight. A heavy and pervasive thaw pressed its mantle upon the gaslit air; a driving sleet numbed the skin and stung the eyes of all who had to face it. Pools of slush, composed in equal parts of ice, water, and mud, impeded the pavements. They invaded the stoutest boots, submerged those less resolute, and imposed not a little inconvenience upon that section of the population which, unaddicted to the wearing of boots, had dispensed with them altogether.

The room in which Northcote kept was no more than a large and draughty garret, which abutted from the northern end of a crazy rectangular building on this curious byway of the world’s affairs. Only a few decrepit tiles, a handful of rotten laths, and a layer of cracked plaster intervened between him and the night. The grate had no fire in it; there was no carpet to the floor. A table and two chairs were the sole furniture, and in a corner could be heard the stealthy drip of icy water as it percolated through the roof.

The occupant of the room sat in a threadbare overcoat with the collar turned up to his ears. His hands, encased in a pair of woollen gloves, which were full of holes, were pressed upon his knees; a pipe was between his teeth; and while he sucked at it with the devout patience of one to whom it has to serve for everything that the physical side of his nature craved, he stared into the fireless grate with an intensity which can impart a heat and a life of its own.

Now and again after some particularly violent demonstration on the part of the weather he would give a little stoical shudder, fix the pipe in the opposite corner of his mouth, and huddle away involuntarily from the draught that came from under the door.

Northcote was a man of thirty who found himself face to face with starvation. He had been six years at the bar. Friendless, without influence, abjectly poor, he had chosen the common law side. Occasionally he had been able to pick up an odd guinea in the police-courts, but at no time had he earned enough to meet his few needs. He was now contemplating the removal of the roof from over his head. Its modest rental was no longer forthcoming; and there was nothing remaining among his worldly possessions which would induce the pawnbroker, the friend of the poor, to advance it.

“I wonder how those poor devils get on who live in the gutter,” he muttered, grimly, as he shuddered again. “You will soon be able to find an answer to that question,” he added, as he stamped his frozen toes on the hearthstone and beat his fingers against his knees.

Quite suddenly he was lifted out of the abyss of his reflection by the sound of a footfall in the room. Jerking up his head, he peered through the darkness towards the door whence the sound had come, but the shadows were so thick that he could see nothing.

“Hullo!” he called.

“Hullo!” came back a wholly unexpected response.

“Who are you? What do you want?” cried Northcote, with a thrill in his voice.

The young man rose to his feet to summon the commoner faculties. For a voice to have invaded his garret at this hour and in this fashion seemed to presage a new epoch to his life.

“Who are you?” he demanded again, having received no reply to the former demand.

“Nobody much,” said the voice, which sounded unlike anything he had ever heard before.

“I’ll strike a match before I get a blow from a bludgeon.”

“Pray do so,” said the voice, quietly.

Northcote began to fumble for the matches and found them on the mantelpiece. He obtained a light and applied it to the wick of the lamp which was on the table, and was then able to read his visitor.

The flicker of the lamp declared him to be a man of forty, of pale and attenuated figure, clad in rags.

“To what am I indebted for the honor of this visit?” said Northcote, with slightly overemphasized politeness.

“Curiosity, curiosity,” muttered his visitor, with the quietness of one who is acquainted with its value.

Northcote turned up the lamp to its highest point and resumed his scrutiny. The voice and manner were those of a man of education; and although the garb was that of a scarecrow, and the face was wan with hunger and slightly debased by suffering, a strange refinement was underlying it.

“This is all very mysterious,” said the young advocate; and indeed the wretched figure that confronted him appeared to have no credentials to present. “May I ask who and what you are?”

“How race reveals itself!” said the visitor, with a faint air of disappointment. “Even the higher types among us cannot cast their shackles away. When we go down into Hades, we are at once surrounded by the damned souls of our countrymen, clamoring to know who and what we are.”

“Well, who are you, at any rate?” said Northcote, oppressed with an acute sense of mystery.

“My name is Iggs,” said the scarecrow.

“Well, Mr. Iggs, I am sorry to say that to me your name conveys nothing.”

“No?”

“No!”

For an instant the scarecrow peered in a strange and concentrated manner into the face of the advocate. He then sighed deeply and rose from his chair.

“With all the learning we acquire so painfully,” he whispered, “we cannot enjoy a perfect immunity from error. Good night, sir. I offer my apologies for having invaded your privacy.”

With a bow of grave deference the strange figure proceeded to glide from the room in the noiseless manner in which it had entered it.

By the time his visitor had reached the door, Northcote called after him hastily: “Come back, Mr. Iggs. I have not expressed myself—not expressed myself adequately. Come back.”

His visitor, with the same air of deference and the same noiselessness of movement, returned to the chair. Northcote fixed two eyes of a devouring curiosity upon his bloodless face. They recoiled with a shock of encounter; two orbs flaming out of it in all their sunken brilliancy had looked within them. Also he beheld a mouth whose lips were curved with the divine mobility of a passion. The advocate clasped his hands to his sides to repress a fierce emotion of pain.

“Perhaps, Mr. Iggs,” he said, “you have been down into the depths of the sea?”

His visitor brushed the green canopy of his mutilated bowler hat slowly and delicately upon the threadbare sleeve of his coat.

“That is true,” he said; “but I would have you not forget that I have also walked upon the peaks of the highest mountains.”

The roar of Fleet Street, the sough of the icy wind through the telegraph wires, the driving of the sleet against the window, and the drip drip of the water through the ceiling seemed to blend with the rich and full tones enveloping these words. A sensation of awe began to surmount the pity and the patronage that the outer semblance of his visitor had first aroused in the breast of the young man.

“With your permission, sir,” he said, “I will go back to my original question, and I will frame it with a deeper sincerity: To what does Henry Northcote owe the honor of this visit?”

“This visit is paid to you, my friend, because for some inscrutable reason Nature mixed blood and fire with your brains. You, too, will go down into the depths of the sea and ascend also into the mountain places.”

“You cannot know that,” said Northcote, with his heart beginning to beat violently.

“Reflect a moment,” said his visitor. “Do you not know as well as I that it is the privilege of us to know everything?”

“True, true! But in what manner has one so obscure as myself been brought to your notice?”

“Every Sunday afternoon for a year past I have been a member of the audience your oratory has enchanted in Hyde Park.”

“How comes it, sir, that one of your condition can bring himself to listen to a mob orator?”

“How comes it that one of a like condition can bring himself to preach to the mob?”

“Primarily, I suppose, that my powers may develop. One day I shall hope to turn them—that is, if it is given to me to survive the present snap of cold weather—to higher things and larger issues.”

“And I, my friend,” said his visitor, “who by no human possibility can survive the present snap of cold weather, I come to tell the young Demosthenes that he can seek no higher thing, no larger issue than to preach to the mob. All the great movements the world ever saw began from below. The power of the sea lies in its depths. Jesus was able to invent a religion by preaching to the mob.”

“There are some who think,” said the young man, “that for one who was ambitious the career of Jesus was a partial failure.”

“The age is crying out for another such failure,” said his visitor.

“Because the old has betrayed them?” said the young man, with fear in his voice.

His visitor left the question unanswered.

“They await the advent,” he said, after a silence in which both breathed close, “of a second Failure to save them from themselves. Only that can prevent them dashing out their brains against the blank wall that has come to stand before them.”

“I believe you to be right, sir,” said the advocate, slowly, as his eyes traversed the chaste delicacy of the face which was framed in shadows.

“The Great Renunciator who first reduces this failure to terms,” said the scarecrow, “will have a sterner task than Jesus had.”

“Yet, sir, you come to one who is almost fainting by the bleak wayside.”

“Have I not listened to your oratory? Do I not discern you to stand at the parting of the ways?”

“Yes, at the parting of the ways,” said the young man heavily. “The hour is at hand when one whose poverty is bitter must make his choice.”

“I have prayed for you,” said his visitor, with such a perfect simplicity that it filled the eyes of the young advocate with tears. “Your ordeal is terrible, for I discern you to be a man of great power.”

“Poverty is a deadly evil,” said Northcote.

“Yet I would have you beware of riches,” said his visitor. “Think of the cruel treachery with which they use so many. See how they have betrayed our own fair land. And it is one such as you, in his virgin immunity, who is called upon to release her from their false embraces.”

“I, sir!” exclaimed the young man, with wild eyes and his heart beating violently. “I, without clothes to my skin, without food in my belly, and who to-morrow will have no roof under which to rest his head!”

The wan smile of the scarecrow embraced his own mutilated hat, broken boots, and ragged condition.

“You may or you may not be the emancipator,” said the scarecrow, peering at him earnestly, “yet the veritable great one whom I see configured before me is some such man as you. I have listened many weeks to your oratory, and you have a strange power. Your voice is noble, and speaks words of authority. Even if you are not the demigod for whom the age is asking,—and, my dear friend, far be it from me to say you are not,—you were yet formed by Nature to do a momentous work for your country.”

“In its casual wards,” said the young man, with an outburst of bitterness.

“The elect upon whom Nature confers true power are generally safeguarded in this wise manner. The ambitions of the market-place are set beyond their reach. I lie down to-night with a p an of thanksgiving upon my lips. May the hour dawn when you also may consign your bones to the snow. But in the meantime you have a great work to do in the world. Nature has filled you with speech; therefore you have the burden of immense responsibilities, for speech is the most signal of her gifts. You may or you may not be the great renunciator whom millions of your countrymen await with fevered looks; but it lies within your province, as it lies within that of every mariner, to array yourself among those of humble prophecy who read the meaning of the star in the east. At least, my friend, all who allow themselves to anticipate a divine appearance are the servants of truth.”

With these words the scarecrow rose from his chair, and, bowing to the young man with an austere but kind dignity, left the room as suddenly and noiselessly as he had entered it.